Reclaiming the Past -- A special report.; Poland Reawakens to Its History As Communism's Mirror Shatters

By HENRY KAMM,

Published: January 26, 1995

Correction Appended

WARSAW—
Digging through Polish Communist Party archives for a study of farm collectivization, Dariusz Jarosz, a 35-year-old scholar, realized that he had struck historical gold: a cache of reports by secret-police informers on the mood of ordinary country folk.

"There was no social history allowed in the Communist years," Mr. Jarosz said. "It would have showed that people always rejected Communism." And that, to his delight, is precisely what the records revealed.

With such a trove, Mr. Jarosz temporarily put aside his study of collectivization in favor of a book, his first. Written for the general reader, it will be called "Through a Distorting Mirror."

That he and other scholars can even conceive of such a project -- let alone undertake one -- would have been unimaginable before Communism began to crumble five years ago. Now Polish historians like Mr. Jarosz have suddenly begun to savor the new-found freedom to examine and write about their country's history as they see it, free from the distortions of the Soviet-era mirror.

They hungrily dig into archives of the party that from 1944 until 1989 interfered in Polish lives at all levels. The reams of documents that tell so much and for that reason were never meant for the eyes of the public now belong to the Government and are open -- not only in Warsaw, but also in towns and villages all over the country.

Explaining the "distorting mirror" of his book title, Mr. Jarosz said candid informers at the bottom level of the spied-on society had been "amateurs." They had full-time jobs as clerks or technicians on collective farms and reported on others either under pressure or to gain advantage.

But by the time these initial accounts of social discontent had made their way to the upper echelons of the police bureaucracy, they had been distorted -- "beautified," Mr. Jarosz said -- to land lightly on the eyes and ears of the spies' superiors. Thus was the fiction of a happy Communist society maintained. The Lies Enforced Alliance With Soviet Union

As the Poles and others formerly under Soviet domination begin to reclaim their heritage they also find unexpected dividends. Mr. Jarosz's book, for instance, has led to collaboration with colleagues in other countries. He expects to attend a conference in Montreal this year. At the suggestion of a Japanese professor, he is preparing a paper for the session with an American historian.

Formerly, such foreign ventures were possible only for historians of the distant past. Prof. Karol Modzelewski of Warsaw University, a leading dissident since the 1960's, often imprisoned, said he had become a medievalist because bygone eras gave more scope for free inquiry.

"No history was free, but in contemporary history there was direct party interference," he said. "Either pure and simple lies or pure and simple silence."

The fate of national history in countries incorporated into others in the Communist era was even harsher than in those that retained their sovereignty, however limited. In Poland or Hungary, history was falsified to justify Soviet dominance. In countries like Estonia or Moldova, it was swept aside and replaced by the Russian-centered history of the Soviet Union.

With less severity, their own history was denied also to smaller member republics of former Yugoslavia. Historians in Slovenia, which never enjoyed independence, are working now to detach national history from that of its former rulers, the Hapsburg Empire as well as Yugoslavia.

"In our schools, the only textbooks were translations from the Russian," said Prof. Helmut Piirimae, a historian at Tartu University, the only one in Estonia, which has fewer than two million inhabitants. "The republics were forbidden to write their own histories. The same texts were used in Tajikistan and Estonia. The translators had to repeat the Russian originals, including their errors. Russia's heroes were the heroes for our children. Other peoples' had no history."

For hundreds of years Poland was denied unity and swallowed up first by Prussia, Russia and Austria and later by Germany and the Soviet Union. So the right to a national history is a perennial subject of Polish anxiety. In the last half-century, Poland's history -- as taught in schools and universities and spread by all the media of the Communist propaganda and entertainment machine -- was founded on assertions that hardly a Pole believed.

Still, they proclaimed them in classrooms and lecture halls and spread them across the land from publishing houses, newspaper offices and film and television studios. Their audiences, when officially required to say so, professed to believe them.

The false history derived from a basic contention that Poles loved the Soviet Union and Communism. These lies were imposed throughout the Soviet camp, but nowhere did they clash more flagrantly with the truth than in this historically anti-Russian and devotedly Roman Catholic country, the largest and most important of Moscow's partners.

The enforced friendship imposed silence or lies about Soviet-inflicted wounds so big that they made contemporary history as told in the Communist decades a misshapen creature.

Melania Sobanska-Bondaruk, an Education Ministry official who is helping to shape a new curriculum, listed some of these sins against history:

*Silence was imposed on the fact that the Soviet Union, under a secret annex to the Hitler-Stalin agreement, joined Germany in invading and carving up Poland in 1939.

*Nothing could be said about Moscow's annexation of large swaths of eastern and northern Poland and the expulsion of much of their populations.

Correction: February 4, 1995, Saturday An article on Jan. 26 about historical research and scholarship in the former Soviet bloc misstated the number of institutions of higher education in Estonia. While only Tartu University offers a broad program in the arts and sciences, more than half a dozen schools are devoted to specialties, like music, engineering, theology and agriculture.